William Dietrich - Getting back

By early afternoon, even Amaya was ready to call a halt. They stood on one of the tallest dunes yet, a fifty-foot-high drumlin, and felt like shipwrecked sailors adrift on a sea of sand. The desert looked endless.

"We can't cross this," Amaya admitted. "We don't have enough water."

"Maybe Ico was right," Daniel speculated. "It does seem to get drier, not wetter, the farther east we go. Maybe Outback Adventure lied to us about that too."

"No, it gets better near the coast," Raven said. "They told me."

"Why do you believe anything they say?"

"Because they've made a better world than this one."

"Come on, Raven. Were you really happy there?"

"Happiness is a luxury. I was… useful."

"Well, survival isn't a luxury," Ethan said. "The plain truth is that we really don't know anything. Nothing useful. That's what's going to kill us. The plain truth is that, essentially, we're lost."

"So what do we do?" Daniel asked. "Go back to the road? To go where?" He thumped the transmitter; they'd taken turns carrying it like a baby. "We need to go that way if you want to use this."

Raven was looking back westward uneasily, a growing wind from that direction blowing back the fan of her hair. The horizon was hazy, the place they'd come from losing all distinction. "Maybe our decision has been made for us."

The others turned. "Rugard?" Amaya asked anxiously.

"No." Raven pointed at the dark cloud swelling there. "Where we need to go right now is off this crest to some kind of shelter."

"Shelter? From what?"

"From that." They looked to where she was pointing and realized it was difficult to tell where the land stopped and the sky began. "I think a sandstorm is coming."

The storm rose over them like a rust-colored cliff, its edge a shadowing overhang. The highest tendrils of dust sprinted ahead of the main wall of sand like out-runners, pushed by hot winds up high. The fugitives sprinted over the dunes back the way they'd come, retracing their own footprints until they reached a rocky ledge a half kilometer away that erupted through the dunes like an exposed root. The sandstone had no cave or hollow but did offer a rib of stability among the soughing sands. Something to anchor to! They skidded down to its base, shed their packs, and crouched, waiting.

The sky got darker and darker. "And we paid to come here," Ethan said.

"I didn't," Raven replied.

The tempest curled over them like a breaking wave and then broke with dark fury. Its shriek ended all conversation, filling their ears with a kind of rasping static. The sand stung like needles and blotted out their sight. They hugged the broken rock and each other, wincing at the abrasion and struggling for breath. Their clothes snapped like flags. While their hollow offered some shelter, the fold of ground also confused the wind so that sand blasted at them from all directions, swirling and pricking. More sand sluiced off the crest of the outcrop, raining down on them like a dry shower. Periodically they struggled upward, pulling their packs with them, to avoid being drifted in by the blowing grains. The adventurers gagged for breath through rags hastily tied around their heads like makeshift bandannas. It felt like they were suffocating in an eerie red twilight. No inch of them was free of grit.

Then the worst of the onslaught was over almost as suddenly as it had come. The wind dropped abruptly as the front of the storm blew on. The sand fell out but the air remained filled with lighter dust, a swirling orange fog. Shakily they stood and untangled themselves, heaving off accumulated sand with a twist of their backs. The dark mass of the storm swept eastward, the desert behind it seeming to smoke. They were left looking like clay statues, coated from hair to boot.

Ethan spat, trying to clear his mouth of grit. "I want my money back, Raven."

The others laughed.

"I want every red cent. With interest."

"It's a small price to come alive," Amaya replied for her, shaking herself like a dog. "Though I wish it would buy me a shower."

"Don't say that!" Daniel warned. "You'll bring the damn floods back."

"I'd say we're about due for a forest fire," Ethan corrected, glancing about with mock trepidation. "Not to mention locusts, earthquakes, tornadoes, and a tsunami wave. Let me check the itinerary." He pretended to thumb through a brochure.

"I can't believe people really lived here," Raven said. "Heat, flies, dust. See, this is what I'm talking about, Daniel. This is the alternative. United Corporations is big and impersonal and bureaucratic and routine, but it also saves us from squalor. It's understandable to be romantic about the outdoors, sure, but this is the reality."

"No it isn't," he spat, trying to clear his mouth of dust. "This is no more representative of wilderness than a slum is of civilization. This desert is the reality you sent people to, but Australians didn't live here. They lived… somewhere else. So could we."

"Not comfortably!"

"Spiritually. Contentedly. Earnestly."

"We're redheads, Raven!" Amaya shouted to interrupt the arguing, swirling her hair so a plume of dust shot off it. "Outback chic!"

"Hey!" The others put their arms up against the flying grit. Amaya twirled away from them, dancing along the rock wall and narrowly dodging an unstable dribble of sand that drained downward. It was a relief to get away from those two! She came to a corner, laughing giddily as she rounded it, and then stopped as if she'd hit a glass wall.

"Okay, glamour girl!" Daniel called. "Which way now?"

Slowly, Amaya backed up and lifted her arm to point past the corner of the cliff. Her voice was quiet, but it carried clearly in the dryness of the now-still air. "Let's ask him."

The newcomer was as shrouded in dust as they were. He strode along the base of the outcrop in long, skidding strides that sent his tattered range coat flapping. The stranger had fled to the outcrop for shelter as they had, Daniel realized, and was as surprised as they were at this meeting. But not intimidated. Their huddled manner reassured him and he marched ahead, his cracked lips widening in gritty welcome.

"Now look what the wind blew in!" He looked at them with bright dark eyes from beneath a greasy bush hat. "Some of the good ones, I'd venture. G'day to the mud people, then!"

"Do you recognize him?" Daniel asked Ethan quietly.

"No. I don't think he's with the Warden."

The man squinted at Ethan. "I'm not with anybody, mate! Though I'm wondering where the likes of you are coming from, that always wants to be with me! For a long time, nothing. Then people here, people there. I spies on more than ever spy on me. Christ! Bloody crowded, it's getting. I come out here to get away from them all, and still I meet you!"

"We drop out of the sky," Ethan said dryly.

"Well, you brought a lot of dirt with you this time, didn't you!" the man replied, squinting up at an atmosphere still brown from dust.

"Who are you?" Raven asked.

He considered. "Why Oliver, I think. Who are you?"

"My name is Raven."

"Oliver is what I remember. Though to a pretty lady like yourself, just Ollie, I suppose. I'm the proprietor."

"The what?"

"The owner! The inheritor! This land is mine, by right of first possession! So don't get any ideas, now! I don't care how damn many of you there are!"

Daniel glanced at Ethan. This one had been in the sun too long.

Amaya was looking thoughtful. "You didn't come with Outback Adventure, did you… Ollie?"

"Outback what?"

"And you're not a convict, either. Not a moral-impaired."

He straightened himself up. "As straight as a ruler, missy. I believe in the law."

"So, where did you come from?"

He looked impatient. "Now that's what your kind never understands. I didn't come from nowhere. I'm just here. On walkabout, you see."